Bluetooth® wireless technology offers personal connectivity and provides freedom from wired connections. Bluetooth® is a specification for a small form-factor, low-cost radio solution providing links between mobile computers, mobile phones and other portable, handheld devices.
Bluetooth® wireless technology is an international, open standard for allowing intelligent devices to communicate with each other through wireless, short-range radio links. This technology allows Bluetooth® compliant devices such as computers, cell phones, keyboards and/or headphones to establish connections, without wires, cables or any direct action from a user. Bluetooth® is currently incorporated into numerous commercial products including laptops, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cell phones, and printers, with more products being released every day.
Modern portable devices increasingly provide converged functionality of many devices that used to be separate entities. For example, it is now common to find PDA, cell phone and portable music player converged into a single device. Such multi-modal devices often comprise a variety of functional blocks to fulfill various tasks and several functional blocks and/or chipsets may access Bluetooth® functionality.
A Bluetooth® system normally comprises a Bluetooth® host that may be part of a functional block, and a Bluetooth® host controller. The Bluetooth® host may, for example, be a GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) chipset or functional block. The Bluetooth® host provides a high level interface between a Bluetooth® command set and a core application furnished by the Bluetooth® host. A Bluetooth® host may be coupled to a Bluetooth® host controller via a host controller interface (HCI). The Bluetooth® host controller comprises the baseband and RF portion of the Bluetooth® system, that is, the actual radio part that may be connected to the Bluetooth® antenna. If, for example, the Bluetooth® host is a GSM block and there is also a multimedia decoder block that may need to stream music to a pair of Bluetooth® headphones, the multimedia decoder will send the audio data to the Bluetooth® Host in the GSM block to be forwarded to the Bluetooth® Host controller. The disadvantage of such a structure is that the functional block comprising the Bluetooth® host is always required to be active whenever Bluetooth® functionality is required, even if its core functionality may not be required. In this example, when the GSM phone functionality is switched off but the user is playing music over Bluetooth® headphones, the GSM block may need to remain active. Such a configuration is, however, power inefficient.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.